Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday July 11, 2014 @03:15PM
from the marketed-as-a-thief-termination-feature dept.

mrspoonsi sends this news from The Verge:
Elon Musk can no longer say that no one's ever died in a Tesla automobile crash. But few people will be pointing fingers at the electric car maker for this senseless tragedy. Earlier this month, 26-year-old Joshua Slot managed to successfully ride off with a Model S he'd stolen from a Tesla service center in Los Angeles, but police quickly spotted the luxury vehicle and gave chase. According to Park Labrea News, the high-speed pursuit was eventually called off after officers were involved in a fender bender of their own, leaving the police department strained for resources and without any feasible way of catching up to Slot. Reports claim he was traveling at speeds of "nearly 100 mph," but losing the police tail apparently didn't convince Slot to hit the brakes. Instead he sped on, eventually colliding with three other vehicles and a pair of street poles. The final impact was severe enough to "split the Tesla in half" and eject Slot from the car's remains. The Tesla's front section wound up in the middle of the road and caught fire. Its rear portion flew through the air with such force that it slammed into the side of a local Jewish community center and became wedged there.

Actually, since energy goes up at the square of velocity, a jump from 100 to 70 is double the impact energy.

Also, getting your car ripped in half after hitting a pole apparently is "normal", in that it happens to many cars. https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com] It's unfortunate, but physics isn't your friend in situations like this.

How much are you betting that in that last article, the driver of the Maxima wasn't driving 100 MPH? Most highway limits are 65 MPH, you're talking 50% faster, which is perhaps not a "huge difference" but it's not negligible. It also doesn't matter if the car splits in half, as long as the driver is protected within the cage (look at how F1 cars crumple when they crash, without a pole, but protect the driver). What matters more is someone probably not wearing a seat belt...

It's actually a rather common, and well studied occurrence. For instance here's a 70 MPH into a tree [wreckedexotics.com] car split in half. Many cars have had extremely weak [autosafetyexpert.com] side impact designs for years. It's also one of the hardest things to protect against since there is no crumple zone on the side to absorb energy, unlike the front and back.

I bet across the country there are multiple cars split in half every single day, many from hitting narrow objects like light poles at relatively modest speeds, like 45MPH.

Minor collision? The BusinessInsider source claims the pursuing officers had to be hospitalized. That doesn't sound "minor" to me.

And they only broke off pursuit when it became impossible for them to continue, not when it became unsafe. Many police departments now have a policy of not performing chases for non-violent crimes because, statistically, you're more likely to kill bystanders by chasing than by letting the criminal drive off.

"Sgt. Chris Tatar, with the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station, said five people in the three vehicles that were struck by the Tesla sustained “varying degrees of injury.” They were hospitalized, and had been released as of Monday, he added."

Incorrect, in modern F1, it's virtually unheard of for the monocoque (the footwell, plus the rest of the area the driver sits in) to be compromise in any way. This includes head on into the barriers at 200mph type crashes. At the British grand prix last week, Kimi Raikkonen walked (with a sore ankle) out of a 47g impact. The monocoque was perfectly in tact.

Nobody can avoid killing you if you don't even pretend to follow the rules of traffic.

I'm a cyclist, and I follow the rules of traffic to the extent that I can. But the metal rims of my bicycle don't have enough surface area to consistently trigger the vehicle-sensing induction loops at intersections. At some intersections in my home town, I've seen even a bicycle and a motorcycle put together fail to trip it. So in the 35 states that haven't passed dead red laws [pineight.com], I don't understand how to follow the law against crossing the street at a red light, other than by not traveling at all.